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You Can See Everything, the surprise Elizabeth Holmes documentary from Nathan Fielder (The Rehearsal) and Lance Oppenheim (Primetime), announced itself early last month with a secret screening at the Telluride Film Festival. And the world has been shook ever since!! Critics have been waxing poetic about the revolutionary genre-busting doc and all the different record-breaking Oscars it could/should qualify for. The Motion Picture Association whetted our collective appetite by slapping the doc with an R-rating — for “graphic nudity.” And perhaps most miraculously of all, those who’ve seen YCSE ahead of its October 16 release are so far adhering to the filmmakers’ request not to spoil it for the rest of us. So when it screened last week at the New York Film Festival, the audience was so on edge over every bonkers twist and turn, that one critic from The Hollywood Reporter said, “You’d think A24 was re-releasing Midsommar, not putting out a three-hour documentary about a disgraced Silicon Valley founder.” Here’s more of what that critic had to say:

For nearly the first (relatively conventional) two hours of the film, Fielder comes at the convicted Theranos founder before her prison term begins in 2023 by lobbing every big and sometimes not-so-big question at her inside her family home, and while she insists she’s telling the truth and has always done so, she seems constantly not to be telling us everything she knows.

The last hour gets considerably wilder, and while every audience member will be on the hot seat not to reveal a formal fact about how Fielder and Oppenheim shape their movie, the truth is that even knowing that fact doesn’t diminish the film’s outlandish pleasures. I did, and was still howling with everyone else at each surprise/unbelievably comic turn, at the sheer postmodern pleasure of it all. Like so much of Fielder’s work, you can’t really ruin the film because the whole experience is so ineffable. It would be like trying to ruin ice cream by describing its texture. You simply need to consume it.

…Holmes and her husband Billy Evans threw their doors open wide to let in the film crew (really, two crews, Fielder and Oppenheim’s, and three cameras) and the pair turned out to be compelling and inscrutable objects, letting the YCSE directors read them like a book, even if it was a book with an occasional chapter in a foreign language. Every time you think you know them, you wonder if you do — or if you instead have to revise everything you thought a minute before.

“Everyone going through the movie had similar moments of cognitive dissonance,” Oppenheim said from the stage, laughingly reassuring the crowd. “I am still struggling to this day to understand what I went through,” Fielder said.

Holmes did not seem to know Fielder’s work beforehand, the director said, which makes the choice that much odder. … Yet the fit also couldn’t be more perfect: an artist in Fielder who has made a career out of piling on so many layers of reality, of zigging back on everything we thought we knew, now taking on a woman who spent a decade in real life doing that to the most powerful people on the planet. In other words, with Elizabeth Holmes, Nathan Fielder had met his match. This is a movie about a magician by a director who specializes in tricks.

…What it all leaves us pondering is not only who these people are but, really, who people are in general, how much is a construct and how much their innate personality — how much of what they (or we) let others see reflects our truest selves.

[From THR]

Postmodern pleasure? Ineffable experience?? LIKE CONSUMING ICE CREAM?! Sounds like we’re getting all our tricks and treats in this spooky season release! And bravo to THR’s Steven Zeitchik for threading that needle of capturing the essence of You Can See Everything without spoiling the ingredients. So much of his review just sings, like that line about having to consume ice cream to get it, or this one: “This is a movie about a magician by a director who specializes in tricks.” (Sidenote: Of course Holmes knew nothing about Fielder’s work. That’s the least surprising tidbit of this film I’ve heard so far.) I’m so intrigued. There are other parts of this review where Zeitchik comments on the dynamic of Holmes and Evans not having the last word on their own portrayal; that’s the job of the filmmakers, whereas Holmes and Evans are the subjects. It makes me wonder, especially on the heels of Holmes choosing this moment to come back online, if either of them has seen the finished film. I get the feeling that Holmes and Evans think a movie exonerating her (them?) is about to come out, while the rest of the world knows it’s a completely different movie. Whatever X posts of cognitive dissonance come as a result of those two realities colliding, well, that’ll be another form of entertainment.

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